Lets say one has a job where basically you do the same thing day after day. That could be taking care of the same equipment, answering the same phone calls, filling out the same reports, etc…
Now how long can one really expect a person can do that same job day after day, year after year, before they basically get tired of it and their performance starts really lacking?
People have done the same job their entire working life, and for a long time that was not only expected, but an ideal.
In most jobs, there’s more than enough day-to-day variation to keep it interesting. Working an assembly line would be an obvious exception, but those who get bored with it will leave early, while others accept being bored as a tradeoff for their salary (one reason Henry Ford paid his workers a dollar a day – a good paycheck in his time – was because people were always quitting. When people made more, they had more incentive to stay).
I’m a public school teacher, and I joke that the job is “three shows a day, five days a week” - and this show has been running off-Broadway for 31 years.
But I regularly get new audiences.
Seven years, three months and twenty two days, give or take a week.
I saw a news article about a guy who tested bathroom scales. He had a doctor’s scale that he weighed himself with at the beginning of the day. Then, he climbed up on an assembly line and simply stepped from scale to scale. If one failed he’d shove it off the conveyor with his foot. Then it was back to stepping from scale to scale.
The news story was that he was retiring after 35 years.
Since this will be variable, let’s move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
That’s the first thing that came to my mind.
My Uncle worked a job where he did the exact same thing every day, 8 hours a day (7 hours working, 1 paid 30 minute lunch, 2 paid 15 minute breaks.). He’d load parts into a tumbler to remove “flash” off of them. He did this same thing for 40 years before he retired with no variation.
He told me that what he liked was the lack of stress. He didn’t have to do anything different, the parts took a certain amount of time to run through the tumbler so they couldn’t make him speed up, there was no mandatory overtime and no weekend work. Some people like that kind of consistency I guess.
The movie Baraka featured footage of people working in factories in southeast Asia. One factory made tape recorders, and there was one guy whose entire job appeared to be verifying that a particular pulley spun freely as each tape recorder passed by him on the conveyor belt. Another factory had rows and rows of women rolling and trimming cigarettes, one at a time, with the aid of some simple unpowered machinery. I think there are probably a lot of jobs like that in the world - and there are probably places where that sort of job is considered steady employment, i.e. a good thing.
That film also showed footage of untouchables in India picking through garbage as it was offloaded from trucks at the landfill, searching for salvageable scraps of…I don’t know what.
How long can a person keep doing that sort of job? Well, just how long did you want to put food on the table for your family? If the alternatives are shipbreaking or home-based e-waste recycling, a mind-numbing job at the factory starts to look pretty good.
No weigh!
Booo! Booooooo! 
I sometimes hear about people like a restaurant owner, or street food vendor in other countries who prepare and sell the same food, day-after-day, week-after-week. “S/He knows what they’re doing because they have been preparing this food their whole lives!”
I guess for most of the world the option of ship-breaking or scavenging trash all day, or the like, or being unemployed provide enuf motivation to deal with the monotony. Is “Job Burn-out” a first-world problem?
I recall a news story about some fellow in the southern USA who worked for one of the smaller newspapers. It was a union job, with a specific pension calculation. This guy had started with the newsroom as a copy boy at age 14, and was retiring at about 90+ years of age. The pension fund calculations, plug in his numbers, salary, years of service, age, yielded a pension of about half a million dollars a year based on his modest salary.
I was in an ancient factory in Joisey where some of the machinery frames had dates around the Civil War and all the safety gear was held on with pop rivets (clearly MUCH later additions). I was running my fingers over the wear points on some enormous tubing mandels, and asked the old foreman how long they’d been in use. “Hell, I dunno,” he said. “They were old and worn when I started here… um, forty-one years ago.”
I was glad to leave the place that day.
It’s common in Asia to see street vendors who prepare one simple dish all their working lives. Most seem pretty happy doing it.
I think it’s a western thing to feel that menial work is beneath us and so choose to engage in thinking about how awful it is to have to suffer so.
Adam Smith weighs in: “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become”
Or people could do different things outside of work. Not that I think doing repetitive work or having a narrow band of hobbies makes one stupid.
In my youth, I had this little switch in my brain that I flicked to “OFF”. This allowed me to do mundane tasks for hours/days/weeks/months. I finally blew a circuit and quit, only to land another job where I ended up doing mundane tasks. I finally ended up going to college out of boredom. Now I have a high paying job where I do mundane …
I was watching a Japanology episode today that showed a man who had been a Sobe noodle cook for 70 years.